I have been trying to find a feature that I used quite often in PFPX but I can’t find it in SB:
1 - I often fly test flights or scenic flights, for example, take-off from airport A, perform a low pass fly-by or touch and go, or two or three or… X and then proceed to a destination airport B at normal altitude/FL. How do I specify that I want to do such, so SB can calculate the fuel needed for that circuit part?
2 - Or let’s say that I want to fly from A to B, but from departure airport to a given waypoint or position I want to maintain a certain lower altitude for sightseeing and only then proceed to cruise level to the destination?
3 - Or let’s imagine that I want to do a test flight from A to A or A to B and along the route I want to perform a hold at a certain waypoint at a chosen altitude or level for let’s say 40 minutes or so.
How do I instruct SB to take any (or all) of these options into account and calculate the fuel for those restrictions/intentions? I was able to configure all these settings in PFPX but can’t find a way in SB.
Thanks in advance!
Hi, not all of this is possible in SimBrief at the moment. But I can list some possible workarounds below:
Circuit fuel is not supported in SimBrief for the moment, I’d recommend adding the approximate amount of minutes in the circuit using the Extra Fuel option.
You can enter altitude changes directly in the route. So for example, to start your flight at 5,000, set 5000 in the Altitude option. Then, given the following route: ABC J1 DEF J2 XYZ, if you want to cruise at 15,000 after DEF, enter it into your route as follows: ABC J1 DEF/F150 J2 XYZ.
You can’t enter a hold directly in the route currently, but you could add 40 minutes of fuel using the Extra Fuel option.
Thanks a lot! Will try those out! Yesterday I tried a certain route and added such example DEF/N0250A015 and that speed/alt restriction was ignored. Was it because of the speed constraint?
What I tried yesterday was to simulate a flyby that my flag carrier performed at an airshow a few months ago, departing from A, flying to B for a flyby without landing and coming back to the origin airport. I have the real flightplan and it flew at F080 then descended to A015 and after the flyby went back to F090. I tried to simulate that but the altitude and speed constraints were simply ignored.
Regarding my questions 1 and 3, I think what you suggest is a fair workaround, thanks!
The speed constraint will simply be ignored by SimBrief, but it won’t prevent it from detecting the altitude. The reason this didn’t work is simply that SimBrief doesn’t recognize /A015 altitudes. Currently it needs to be formatted as /F015.
EDIT: Actually, on closer look, it seems that it also doesn’t accept manual altitudes less than 3,000 ft or so. This is trickier to fix than it sounds, so I’ll have to look into it further down the road.
Thanks once again! Actually after my last reply I found out myself that format /Axxx altitude is not recognised, but entering /F0xx did the job. In terms of aviation accuracy it is wrong, but for simulation purposes it’s more than acceptable.
Regarding the speed restrictions, not a major issue either.
Regarding the lower limit of 3000ft, it’s not a big issue either. There shouldn’t be a lot of virtual pilots planning flights or constraints that low anyway. But for training ILS or other procedures or so it’s quite useful for me, that’s why I decided to ask about its possibility.
Thanks once again!